My dream is to see my well styled events decor crafts in all major retail outlets

A handcrafted art piece by Faith Kioko. PHOTO| COURTESY

What you need to know:

  • I’m a paper crafter.
  • I use different kinds of paper to hand-make crafts for birthday parties, weddings and interior decor.

Faith Kioko is nothing short of a pioneer. Years ago, she mastered the art of using paper as a versatile medium for progressive modern craft. She customises the made-to-order pieces.

Faith’s work is the North Star to a local handcrafting industry that has been crawling strong for years, and is only now on its feet walking a brisk.

This is Faith’s story:

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I’m a paper crafter. I use different kinds of paper to hand-make crafts for birthday parties, weddings and interior decor. I make such crafts as props, cake toppers and backdrops.

I mostly use cardstock, kraft and crepe paper, and foam and cover board. Sometimes I use vinyl. I love working with paper because it is easy to manipulate and whatever you make with it is permanent.

Pinterest matured my fascination with handcrafting. There were all these do-it-yourself projects and the further I went into the rabbit hole, the more I learnt, the more my fascination blossomed. Pinterest is why I stopped hand-making beaded jewellery.

I am part of an intimate online community called Crafters Kenya. The 40 of us include fabric and upcycling crafters. We were about four crafters back in 2015 when I started out, and we were not all doing it full-time as a business. I want this community to learn from each other. I also want to teach emerging crafters so they don’t have to take several years figuring their way around the art and craft of the business, as I did.

In 2017, I tutored 12 Ugandan refugees about home craft decors. And they were all men. Creatives Garage Academy organised the classes, they wanted to empower the refugees to make money off a creative skill. Crafting was one part of the tutorials — they also learnt about photography.

Hand-making wedding decor almost had me call it quits. I did four weddings that year, in 2016. Doing one wedding took two to three months. My clients were happy, I wasn’t — I put a real cost to the materials and tools, but I couldn’t put one to my time and creative skill.

DEGREE HOLDER

I have a Bachelor’s degree in Commerce from the University of Nairobi. I majored in marketing. The degree didn’t live up to my expectations because it wasn’t until our third year that we began to focus on marketing. I’d already completed a diploma in public relations and a professional course in marketing. They are more practical and useful than my degree is. I sat the degree because I knew someday I’d regretfully ask myself, What if?

See more pictures of my work on Instagram as @thehandmadecraftlifeke. And on my Facebook page, DIY Love Kenya. I taught kids how to make crafts, kids between five and 11 years. I taught them for a year — once a month on the weekends — at the Creatives Garage. The garage back then was located in an old majestic maisonette on Muringa Road.

They’ve since moved to Westlands. I had a lot of fun teaching and crafting with the kids but I wasn’t making any money. Overheads of location, minders and materials ate into what I was charging per day.

My mother is my greatest voice of persistence. I admire her, she’s a crafter like me but she’s also been a teacher, farmer, counsellor … basically an adventurous jill-of-all-trades.

If I had Sh1 million for my business at this very moment, I’d invest in a creative director, someone who’ll think up concepts with me, and in more machines.

I shipped in a machine from the US called a Cricut, it’s for cutting paper. Size of a desk printer. Hand-cutting a cake topper, for example, would take me four hours with a pen blade, yet the lines wouldn’t be as clean and precise as I’d like.

The machine cuts in 20 minutes, doesn’t matter how intricate the pattern is.

My dream is to someday walk into a supermarket and in the section for events decor, have my well-styled crafts lined up and ready for sale.

We import most of these items yet they can be made here in Kenya. I want to get into small-scale manufacturing of ready-made products for the mass market.